Eggs, eggs and more eggs!

 My egg skelter started off with just a few eggs and I wondered if it would ever fill up.

Then the chickens started going crazy laying a ton of eggs each day. I get over 15 eggs a day and sometimes 19! They are egg laying machines now! I love the variety of colors I get in the nest boxes now. It makes collecting eggs so much fun!

One problem with so many layers in the hen house is fighting over the nest boxes. All the reading material says that 1 nest box per 5 hens is a good amount. Apparently my chickens do not agree with this . If you look closely, there are 4 chickens in the 4 boxes and 3 outside the boxes waiting for their turn. I do have 22 chickens, so I guess if you do the math I should add one more box in there, but it seems they'd like 4 more boxes instead. At least they are laying in the nest boxes and not on the floor.

Here is my egg skelter slowly filling up a few weeks ago.

 Here it is completely full. We fill it completely every other day now. Now I have to wash eggs every other day too and fill up egg cartons.

I even made labels for the cartons too. We've been giving them to friends, neighbors and family members. So many eggs!!!

So Many Eggs and Easter Eggers!

So when you have 22 chickens, eventually you'll have tons of eggs. I have 19 chickens out of the 22 all laying eggs. I went from 2 to 3 eggs a day to 11 to 18 eggs a day. Fortunately, they do not all lay eggs every day, so I am averaging a dozen a day. That is a lot of eggs! We have given some to family members and some to the neighbors now. My egg skelter fills up every other day now since it will hold 2 dozen. I have to rotate the less fresh eggs to the frig every other day now too. I guess it is a good problem to have and I can't believe I was complaining about not having enough eggs a few weeks ago.

The colors and variety of shapes are so much fun. Each chicken lays a certain color and shape. I have figured out who lays what egg pretty much. I was fortunate to have both of my new Easter Egger chickens lay greenish blue eggs, so now I have 3 Easter Eggers that lay colored eggs. Sometimes you can end up with one that does not lay green or blue eggs, I know of a few people that raised them to maturity and ended up with brown eggs. Nothing is wrong with brown eggs, but if you go through the trouble of raising them from chicks and you specifically wanted them for their colored eggs, it is pretty disappointing.

Here are the eggs from my Easter Eggers

The Easter Eggs are a great breed to have except for their tendency to go broody and want to hatch eggs which our older hen decided to do last year, so we had almost 3 months with no eggs from her. I broke her of her broodiness eventually.. That was a unique experience for me since I had no idea what I was doing. Anyway after her broodiness was gone she went into a molt. Everything I read about chickens said that they do not go broody or molt until after they are a year old, she was only 8 months! I guess she did not read the book I did!

Here is our older EE, her eggs are more of an olive green too. She lays extra large eggs. She'll be a year old in a few weeks.

You can see the difference in the egg colors a little more here. The bottom left is the Golden Buff egg and the one beside it is an EE egg. Her eggs are 2.3 ounces usually now.

If you're thinking of getting chickens, I would recommend Easter Eggers, if you want a variety of colors in your egg carton.